Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Social media ‘scientist’ Zarrella joins Cambridge’s Hubspot

By Galen Moore

Social media consultant Dan Zarrella has joined the staff at Hubspot Inc. as an inbound marketing manager, according to Zarrella and the company.

Zarrella made tech blog headlines twice in the past month, by developing the Twitter mashups Tweetbacks and TweetSuite. Tweetbacks is a blog widget that displays all posts to Twitter that link back to a particular blog post. TweetSuite integrates blogging platform WordPress with the social microblogging site. Zarrella has also written an application that automatically grades content on the likelihood that it will be promoted on social content-sharing sites such as Digg and Reddit.

“He’s right up our alley,” said Brian Halligan, CEO and co-founder of the Cambridge-based online marketing and search engine optimization company.

Zarrella, formerly a search engine optimization and social media marketing manager at Natick-based Advanced Media Productions Inc., has styled himself a “social media scientist.” Halligan said the label fits.

Hubspot, which provides the online tools “Twitter grader” and “website grader,” will be rolling out similar new tools about once a month in the coming months, Halligan said. “(Zarrella) is going to be very helpful as we come up with new ideas for tools like Twitter Grader.”